Bringing Leadership into Focus

"A close friend who knew Mark through The London Perret Roche Group, LLC introduced me. She had great things to say and I was looking for someone to help me and my colleagues give our business a significant boost, as they had hers. I initially thought my partners and I might work with Mark and his partners as corporate coaches, however, I decided to start with Mark as a personal business coach for me.

I experienced a significant breakthrough with our very first session, two weeks before a critical client meeting. I wanted help sorting through concerns and clarifying next steps. My goal was to do everything possible to ensure that my firm surpassed the new client’s expectations at our first meeting. This particular client had the potential to bring a large amount of business to my firm and I wanted everything to go perfectly.

In a little over two hours, Mark helped me specify the outcome I wanted not just in general, but in me — including the shift I would be require me to make in my thinking. He also helped me see how the problem I was wrestling with fit into a larger context and helped me do a bit of internal rewiring to approach the situation the way I needed to without having to stress about it.

Mark helped me make explicit what I guess I’ve known intuitively: One of my strengths is getting the right person in the right role in teams I support so we can all do well, have fun, and grow. What concerned me about this meeting was that certain of the players knew each other, and the history wasn’t entirely positive. Although we had the potential to create a great future, there was also the potential to recreate dynamics from the past that would not be effective in this new situation. Frankly, some of the meeting participants were brilliant … but also could be difficult to work with. I could see that even I got sucked in at times, even though I knew better. So that first hour with Mark helped me clarify my role to enable me to more effectively direct a team of people to work brilliantly and in almost perfect harmony.

In the second part of our session, Mark helped me look inside myself to see what parts of me were creating this behavior. Mark used a modified relaxation/meditation technique to help me identify different aspects of my personality that were somewhat at odds, and to create a better way of accepting and nurturing those important yet different parts of my personality so that I was less anxious and more effective.

During the week following our first coaching session I took action on several things I discussed with Mark and produced outstanding results for myself and several of my colleagues. The interesting thing is that I had the coaching session with Mark and everyone in my office had breakthrough results in preparing for that seminal meeting. Not surprisingly the meeting went exceptionally well. After the meeting one of my partners summed it up very nicely by saying, 'If this coach you are working with had anything to do with this then we should definitely be working with him more often.'

Mark is a great listener, extremely thoughtful and direct. He also has an intuitive ability to ask exactly the right questions. His distinctive approach helped me figure out the best way to proceed on several complex issues, not just this first one. He has a knack for very quickly helping me clarify my concerns, identify what needs to be done, what specific outcomes I want to achieve and how to achieve tangible results.

The most important thing about Mark is that he doesn’t just help with the obvious/ordinary business issues. He knows how to get beyond the apparent and he really helped me get to the heart of the issues that were troubling me. With his help we created novel, effective approaches to solve some potential problems and ultimately produce very effective results."